The Fabulous Riverboat

Actors didn’t have to be politicians, but politicians had to be actors.

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

“It’s a nice toy and makes a lot of noise and looks impressive and will kill a man. But it’s wasteful and inefficient.”

“You make it sound like a congressman,” Sam said.

A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion.

Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.

Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat.

His thinking wasn’t logical. But whatever the philosophers claimed, the main use of logic was to justify your emotions.

Of course, I’m only indulging in mankind’s vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence.

He was stiff and sometimes a little strange, which was what you’d expect from an engineer, but he had a moral backbone as inflexible as a fossilized dinosaur’s.

I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support.

But we may not be able to climb high enough. Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.

It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally able to comprehend democracy.